The Shopping Revolution: How Successful Retailers Win Customers in an Era of Endless Disruption

by Barbara E. Kahn

Overview

SILVER WINNER, IBPA BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AWARDS & FINALIST, 2018 FOREWORD INDIES BOOK OF THE YEAR

Featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Vox, The Shopping Revolution offers a “brilliant analysis of the disruptive effect that Amazon is having on the retail industry and how stores can fight back in order to survive,” according to Forbes’ Walter Loeb.

Amazon disrupts everything it touches and upends any market it enters. In the era of its game-changing dominance, how can any company compete?

We are just witnessing the start of the radical changes in retail that will revolutionize shopping in every way. As Amazon and other disruptors continue to offer ever-greater value, customers’ expectations will continue to ratchet up, making winning (and keeping) those customers all the more challenging. For some retailers, the changes will push customers permanently out of their reach—and their companies out of business.

In The Shopping Revolution, Barbara E. Kahn, a foremost retail expert and professor at The Wharton School, examines the companies that have been most successful during this wave of change, and offers fresh insights into what we can learn from their ascendance.

Kahn, also the author of Global Brand Power: Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth, examines:

• How did Amazon become the retailer of choice for a large portion of the US population, and how can other companies work with them or compete with them?
• How did Walmart beat out other grocers in the late 1990s to become the leader in food retailing, and how must they pivot to hold their leadership position today?
• How did Warby Parker make a dent in the once-untouchable Luxottica’s lucrative eyewear business, and what can that tell start-ups about how to unseat a Goliath?
• How did Sephora draw customers away from once-dominant department stores to become the go-to retailers for beauty products, and what can retailers learn from their success?
• How are luxury and fast-fashion retailers competing in the ever-changing, fickle world of fashion?

Building on these insights, Kahn offers a framework that any company can use to create a competitive strategy to survive and thrive in today’s—and tomorrow’s—retail environment.

“A brisk and thought-provoking anatomy of shopping in the 21st century.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A must-read for anyone who aspires to reach customers today—and tomorrow.”
—Marc Lore, CEO, Walmart eCommerce US

“A masterful storyteller, Barbara Kahn expertly unpacks the strategies of today’s seemingly unbeatable retailers. An indispensable guide for anyone who has a product to sell.”
—Stuart Weitzman, Founder, Stuart Weitzman LLC
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613630860
Publisher:	Wharton School Press
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	174
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Barbara E. Kahn is the Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She served two terms as the director of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center. Prior to rejoining Wharton in 2011, Barbara served as the dean and Schein Professor of Marketing at the School of Business Administration, University of Miami, Miami, Florida. Before becoming dean at UM, she spent 17 years at Wharton as Silberberg Professor of Marketing. She was also vice dean of the Wharton undergraduate program.

Barbara is an internationally recognized scholar on retailing, variety seeking, brand loyalty, product assortment and design, and consumer and patient decision-making. She has published more than 75 articles in leading academic journals. She is the author of The Shopping Revolution: How Successful Retailers Win Customers in an Era of Endless Disruption and Global Brand Power: Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth. She is also the coauthor of Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Consumer.

Barbara has been elected president of the Association for Consumer Research, elected president of the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) Policy Board, and selected as a Marketing Science Institute trustee. She was also an associate editor at JCR, Journal of Marketing, and Marketing Science. She has recently been elected as a fellow for both the Association of Consumer Research and the Society of Consumer Psychology. Barbara received her PhD, MBA, and MPhil from Columbia University, and her BA from the University of Rochester.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Disruption in the Retailing World ix

Chapter 1 Gain a Competitive Edge: The Kahn Retailing Success Matrix 1

Chapter 2 Amazon the Disrupter: Laser Focus on Customer Convenience 17

Chapter 3 Lead on Price: Everyday Low Pricing 45

Chapter 4 Differentiate on Brand: The Vertically Integrated Brand 61

Chapter 5 The Paradox of Luxury: When Low Prices and Accessibility Are Undesirable 83

Chapter 6 Compete on Customer Experience: The Lure of Emotional and Sensory Engagement 101

Conclusion 121

Appendix: Measuring Fair-Value Thresholds 127

References 129

Index 143

About the Author 151

About Wharton Digital Press 153

About the Wharton School 154

Editorial Reviews

"“In The Shopping Revolution, Barbara Kahn reveals what has enabled today’s most successful retailers to thrive in the face of these challenges. An essential read for anyone … who wants to understand the massive changes underway in retail.” —Neil Blumenthal, co-CEO and co-founder, Warby Parker


“Barbara Kahn zeroes in on how a few formidable retailers have gained ascendance and offers advice to retailers on how to develop their own winning strategies…. Provides a thoughtful framework on how to innovate in the new world of retail.” —Oliver Chen, Managing Director, Cowen and Company


“A masterful storyteller, Barbara Kahn expertly unpacks the strategies of today’s seemingly unbeatable retailers. An indispensable guide for anyone who has a product to sell in the retail world.” —Stuart Weitzman, Founder, Stuart Weitzman LLC


“As Barbara Kahn powerfully argues, it is possible to compete in the era of rapidly changing shopping behavior. A must-read for anyone who aspires to reach customers today—and tomorrow.” —Marc Lore, CEO, Walmart eCommerce US


“Sharing the stories of successful companies, Barbara Kahn offers a framework to structure strategic thinking and set the path for success. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand how to compete in retail—now and in the future.” —Pierre-Yves Roussel, Member of the Executive Committee, LVMH (Louis Vuitton - Moët Hennessy)


“Ideal for those who want to gain insight into the dynamically changing retail industry. This great read covers the mechanics at play in a straight-forward manner and will help readers understand the direction retailers must take to succeed.” —Al Sambar, Managing Director, Kurt Salmon, part of Accenture Strategy


“Barbara E. Kahn reveals how leading retailers are generating strong growth and offers strategies for competing in an ever-shifting marketplace. I highly recommend The Shopping Revolution to anyone who wants to … learn how to outperform the competition.” —Thomas Kingsbury, CEO, Burlington Stores


“A brisk and thought-provoking anatomy of shopping in the 21st century.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2018-06-14
A study of the fraught world of retail in the age of Amazon. The latest from Wharton School professor Kahn (Marketing/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Global Power Brand, 2013, etc.) notes the sweeping chaos and disruption among American retailers. Dozens of such name-brand national businesses have either shut down outlets or shut down completely in recent years. She opens her account of this upheaval by identifying what she sees as seven key forces at work, including massive advertising data-collection; vertical integration in order to control all aspects of a brand; an excessive number of brick-and-mortar stores; a younger, less brand-loyal customer base; retail customers moving to cities, away from sprawling suburbs and shopping centers; and a general shift toward online shopping across multiple platforms. But the main focus here, which the author calls "the gorilla in the room," is the online retailer Amazon.com, with its "fierce understanding of what customers want." Amazon fills these wants with a seemingly unbeatable combination of basics, she says, including low prices, fast service, responsive returns, and all-inclusive convenience. The company's model is a familiar one, she points out—it was used, for instance, by Walmart in the 1990s—but the amount of resources that Amazon has put behind it has caused other retailers, big and small, to scramble to adapt. Kahn studies strategies by successful businesses, such as cosmetics retailer Sephora and eyeglasses store Warby Parker, and she offers readers "the Kahn Retailing Success Matrix," which looks at variances between different aspects of the retail process. Kahn lays this all out with a brevity and clarity that's extremely effective. She also makes ample use of simple charts, designed to show the different quadrants of her Success Matrix—"Product Benefits," overall "Customer Experience," and the specific abilities to "Increase Pleasure" and "Eliminate Pain Points"—as they flow into and sharpen one another. At times, the tenor of the book seems willfully reductionist, as it likely takes more than faithful adherence to a successful matrix to give a small mom-and-pop bookstore, say, a chance against a corporate juggernaut. That said, modern retailers will find the book's breakdowns of the essentials of retail helpful for widening their perspective and keeping the bigger picture in view. Particularly insightful are her examinations of "Generation Z," the "digitally native millennials" whose relationship to traditional advertising and retail is very different from those of customers of the past. The author also treats the changing nature of brick-and-mortar buying-and-selling with pleasing nuance. Indeed, she makes a case for the necessity of a brick-and-mortar renaissance, and the urgency of creating "highly compelling in-store customer experiences" to make that happen. It's also a canny move for Kahn to get into the nitty-gritty of how a handful of companies have maintained their success, as it provides a welcome counterweight to the book's tendency toward extensive theorizing. A brisk and thought-provoking anatomy of shopping in the 21st century.

Kirkus Reviews